Monday, February 20, 2012

Sonia Delaunay

This post has been a looooong time coming. Actually, ANY post at all on this blog has been a long time coming. My poor, dusty old blog. I have such precious little time for creating, that when I do have time I want to spend it actually creating and not writing about it. You all know the drill I'm sure, as so many of us are in the same boat.
Anyway. Last August I was down in NYC for the Quilters Take Manhattan event, hosted by The Alliance for American Quilts. (side note: Just found out they're doing it again this year, whee!) At the main even, I was sitting with my girl Jonesie (otherwise known as Heather Jones of Olive and Ollie fame) and (be still my heart!) Kate Spain. Kate showed us a copy of a book she'd just gotten, this book from the Cooper-Hewitt from the Sonia Delaunay retrospective they held last year. Delaunay's work is amazingly modern and graphic, and so much of it lends itself to translation into a quilt. I think I actually ordered my copy of the book right then and there from my phone. And as soon as it arrived I started marking pages for different works and designs that I wanted to turn into quilts.

This was the first one I worked on:

It's a gouache on wallpaper, mounted on cardboard, that was a design for a rug.
And this is my wall-hanging sized quilt, with vertical straight line quilting:

Here's a close-up of the quilting. I did insanely dense quilting over the colored sections, since the original was so sketchy and had lots of white breaking through:

Here was my next pick. This is another gouache on paper, and is less yellowy than this picture:

Here is my quilt interpretation. The dimensions are sort of unusual for a quilt, narrower than normal, because I was following the painting pretty closely. More straight-line quilting too, horizontal this time to echo the horizontal pattern. (More accurately, it is quilted "in the style of straight line," as I am constantly proving that I am completely incapable of actually sewing a straight line.)

Here's the back, with just a little bit of piecing with some leftovers:

Josh would clearly like you all to note his support for and dedication to rock 'n roll. :)
I sleep with this book next to my bed and look at it almost every day. I am mildly obsessed. I have fabric for another quilt, and have started graphing out a fourth. Stay tuned!